Story Type Debuts on Fed Square's New Digital Screen

Story Type is presented by creative studio General Strike and is inspired by Melbourne’s most celebrated writers, to coincide with the Melbourne Writers Festival 2018.

Specifically designed for the state-of-the-art five-storey LED digital screen, the film uses typographic animation to bring fragments of each work to life.

“Our aim in creating Story Type was to really bring the building to life,” said Director of General Strike, Laurence Billiet.

“Federation Square is a place for all Melbournians to gather together, so we have tried to choose quotes that reflect a little of the diversity of the Melbourne experience.”

The film was commissioned by Federation Square to mark this year’s Melbourne Writers Festival and will continue to show on rotation throughout the year.

Story Type features a selection of quotes from books set in Melbourne that are animated on screen, exploring the city through the eyes of its authors.

The film offers a taste of Melbourne’s literary heritage, drawing from 12 novels, one memoir and one short story from a range of both new and established Australian voices, including Helen Garner, Alice Pung, Michelle de Kretser, Nam Le, Christos Tsiolkas, Tony Birch, Emily Bitto and Frank Hardy.

“I hope the film will inspire viewers to seek out or rediscover both the featured authors as well as the many other local writers, poets, playwrights and so on currently working in our city,” said Billiet.

The film is bookended by quotes from Lisa Lang’s Utopian Man, a fictitious imagining of the life of E.W Cole, a great advocate of books and founder of Melbourne’s iconic Cole’s Book Arcade.

“It was a way of pointing to Melbourne’s literary heritage and hopefully inspiring viewers to seek out further reading adventures,” said Billiet.

General Strike is creative content and events studio based in Brunswick. Between them, directors Laurence Billiet and Rachael Antony have produced content for a wide variety of media brands including SBS, National Geographic, Vice, Lonely Planet, Discovery, Wallpaper*, i-D, The Age and Vogue. www.generalstrike.com.au